Despite your best efforts, your business is vulnerable to a disaster. At any moment, a natural event can strike or human activity can target your business. What happens when you experience a sudden and unpredictable loss? Think for a moment about the next action you would take. If you are scrambling for ideas, you need to reevaluate your disaster recovery plan. Only businesses that plan with survive relatively unscathed and continue with business as usual.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A DR is a company’s established plan for IT recovery after a business experiences a sudden loss; it is a part of the company’s effective continuity plan. A disaster plan is documented and shared with the necessary employees within an organization so the plan can be executed successfully to prevent downtime and data loss. A sudden loss may be a natural disaster, power loss, man-made disaster, human error or malicious activity, pandemic, loss of a critical employee, and theft.

What Should a DR Include?

When you are drafting your Disaster Recovery Plan, consider the following factors to help you resume business. Don’t leave any tech black spots in your plan.

Data

Connectivity back to server

Software

Company’s hardware

IT room

Don’t wait to test the plan when a loss occurs; perform regular tests to ensure your plan is designed as it should be and will provide a successful and seamless recovery when it is needed.

How Does a DR Keep Me in Business?

If your company has carefully created a plan and successfully executed it, business will resume as it did before disaster struck. Every moment your business in not in business is money lost, and worst of all—confidence lost. No one wants to have the conversation with their clients, vendors, employees and business partners about not being able to work because there was no plan. You carry business insurance, and a DR plan is a type of IT insurance in a world that is dominated by technology and in-demand service. You can’t afford not to be prepared.

A Disaster Recovery Plan eliminates the dreaded and costly ‘unavailable’ title that your company will bear after a disaster. Instead of turning away business, you can provide all of your business partners and consumers with the confidence that you have the ability to take care of their needs, despite the location, as you promised when you went into business together or asked them for their business.

Your monetary loss will be reduced greatly. Recovery can cost a lot of money if you have to replace software and company data. If you are hit by a disaster, your expenses will be drastically lower than those of a company that is not prepared.

A plan creates more awareness within the company. As the plan is being drafted, managerial members of the team will gain better insight into the process and the daily activities that are critical to the operation. They will also be in a better position to identify potential threats and areas of vulnerability.

Your customers and business contacts will feel more secure doing business with you when they see you have taken the steps to address any and all concerns that affect them if disaster strikes. The plan is more than IT recovery; it shows commitment, quality of work, and attention to detail.

Productivity is not lost. When your employees cannot work, your business cannot thrive. Every minute down is productivity and profit lost. Your business activity can resume remotely if necessary.

Your company’s reputation depends on its ability to protect itself. Consumers and partners will associate your brand and your business with reliability and preparedness.